Denver Plans To Host a Clyfford Still Museum

Monday, 19 March 2007 20:44

DENVER, CO -  The British art historian David Anfam stood outside a warehouse, a long concrete slab with a steel roof on the outskirts of a nondescript suburb, and confided, “I feel like the archaeologist Howard Carter about to enter Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

The works in question make up the entire estate of this artist. He left behind a one-page will, nearly 95 percent of the work he ever made (he sold or gave away only 150 pieces in his lifetime) and a widow determined to follow his final testament to the letter. The demands were these: His estate could be bequeathed only to an American city, one that would build a museum to serve as a temple to his art and to nothing else. No works could ever be sold. No other artist could ever show a single piece alongside his. All Clyfford Still, all the time.

Most textbooks of postwar American art will tell you how important Still’s vast and powerfully austere canvases are in the pantheon. Robert Motherwell described Still’s first solo show in New York in 1946 as “a bolt out of the blue.” Critics hailed the sheer physicality, soaring presence and soulful sublimity of his abstract pictures. Yet his reclusiveness in later life and the unyielding stringency of his will have not served him well in posterity. Only three big exhibitions surveying his work have been mounted in the last 30 years.

Lately, though, Still and his art have glided back into view. First came word in 2004 that his widow, Patricia Still, after decades spent spurning other metropolitan suitors, had chosen Denver as host of a Clyfford Still Museum, largely because of the overtures from the city’s ambitious mayor, John Hickenlooper. Then in November “1947-R-No. 1,” a bracing Still painting in red and black, went for $21.29 million at Christie’s in New York: a record for this artist and nearly seven times his previous high just two years earlier. The same month the announcement came that Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, a rising architectural star, would design the museum, anticipated to open in early 2010.

No one knows Still’s work better than Mr. Anfam, considered one of the world’s premier experts on Abstract Expressionism and the author of the definitive study on Still. Enlisted as an adviser to the museum who will write the artist’s catalogue raisonné, he was joined on that brisk winter morning by Sandra Campbell, one of Still’s two daughters, who now oversee his estate, and Dean Sobel, the museum’s director.

More than 700 paintings and 1,200 works on paper were in this single room. (Another room down a maze of halls holds about 400 more works that were in the private collection of Still’s widow, who died in 2005, and that will join her husband’s in the new museum.) Mr. Anfam gravitated toward a long rectangular table that was laid out with 13 oils from the 1920s to the ’40s, tracking Still’s evolution from stylized figures to abstraction on a sweeping scale.

On an easel near the door was a self-portrait he made at the age of 36. He looks down on the viewer with a handsome, angular face and a cool glance. “Defiant” is the word that came to Mr. Anfam’s mind, and then “imperious.”

He insulted and abandoned old friends — Mark Rothko among them — for any whiff of complicity with pure commerce or consuming neediness. He called galleries and museums “gas chambers.” He made grandiose pronouncements like “These are not paintings in the usual sense; they are life and death merging in fearful union.” He described himself as a Puritan.

As the visit to the warehouse was nearing an end, Mr. Sobel turned to Mr. Anfam and smiled. “So it looks like we have a museum to fill.”

When Mr. Sobel turned to his guests and said that at last it was time to go, Mr. Anfam reached for words to sum up the extraordinary day. “It slowly dawns on you what we’ve seen here today and what people are going to see — the revision of the history of Abstract Expressionism as the enormousness of Still’s achievement finally pulls into view,” he said. “A picture here, a picture there — you think it’s a little trickle in a bathtub, but what you’ve got is Niagara Falls.”

By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF